I had a depressing realization the other day: Bernie Sanders is not a threat to the system.
Because, if he was, they’d have killed him long ago.
Let me back up a bit. When I was a kid my dad had a year’s sabbatical that he spent at the National Archives in Paris – right in the swirl of the student riots and the Algerian revolution (France’s other Vietnam). I had a lot of time wandering the city, mostly looking at the things a kid looks at; in spite of the riots in those days it was safe to be an American kid wandering around. It was one of those summers that I fell in love with a graphic that I did not understand:
I bought a poster, which brought some muffled giggles from my dad, who said something about “remarkably effective propaganda.” And, it was! It wasn’t until many years later that I read a biography of Guevara and discovered that he was ill-groomed, smelled bad, and was pretty stupid. But, damn, did that poster make him look like a superhero.
By the way, if you’re into the semiotics of political posters, you may wish to consider this knock-off of the Che poster:
It’s nowhere near as effective, but then I now see it as unintentionally revealing a lot about the man it portrays.
I’m still mostly happy that Obama was president, but only because – as usual – the alternatives were worse. But he was not a president who brought change. Che Guevara had more change in his stinky, poorly groomed little toe than Barack Obama had in his entire sweet-smelling, well-groomed, slick body. My current political awareness assumes that Che would have turned out to be a real piece of shit, eventually – men who see power coming out of the barrel of a gun usually a) see clearly b) want to wield that power to solve all problems, because it’s easy. The clarity of their ideological vision blurs in the details of implementation and eventually they fail and force remains an answer.
None of that is to imply that Sanders would be lining people up on Central Park to have them shot. In spite of what the breathless cheerleaders in the media say, Sanders is simply not that effective. I’m not saying that death squads are a reliable way of getting worthwhile things done; historically they aren’t. And, usually the people who order the death squads are squeamish little sociopaths (like Himmler) who are traumatized by observing the effects of their own orders.
But, the people who have the history of shooting the other side are not the socialists. It’s the establishment. In fact, the establishment has a long history of killing socialists in the US, which I suppose you can set on the scales of judgement alongside of the fairly few attempts by leftist radicals to bring violence to the police and the power structure. As I have written before, 1968 was marked by thousands of domestic terrorist bombings within the US – a few of which hurt people, but many of which were provoked by undercover FBI agents. The real violence came from the establishment, which send the National Guard with loaded weapons to go sort out pathetic rioting white university kids; and that was their big mistake. The really serious violence was the establishment cracking down on egalitarian movements (which, yes, had their socialist component) in the South: Selma and Atlanta. It strikes me as suspicious that establishment mouthpieces try to claim that Bernie Sanders is going to start the shootings, when it’s the establishment that has been doing most of the shooting all along. I’m comfortable with assuming that the establishment killed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. (even though MLK was more aligned with the establishment than a revolutionary like Malcolm) probably Bobby Kennedy and maybe even his brother John. It was the establishment that locked Eugene V. Debs up for saying the US should stay out of WWI (hint: Debs was right! The US had no business in that family spat among European imperialists) – let’s say the establishment killed him, too: it was in prison that his health was broken, while he was running for president from his cell. It ought not escape anyone’s attention that it was the establishment that has set up and profited from the carceral state, in which America re-invents slave labor in the form of low-wage extorted prison work for capitalists. That is actually one invention from the nazis that the US has adopted; usually the adoption was the other way around. The US establishment made multiple attempts to assassinate Castro, possibly Hugo Chavez, and there was all that awkward assassinating stuff with the death squads in Colombia.
It was the establishment that decided, under Barack Obama, that the US should clandestinely assassinate its own citizens, and kill their children too – a thing which I see as some kind of Rubicon of badness that demarcates the establishment’s finally declaring open war on dissenters.
What I’m trying to say is: if you’re a socialist who threatens the US establishment, you can tell that you threatened them, because you’re dead.
So, the reason Bernie’s alive at all is that he’s useless and ineffective and the establishment is sure that he’d accomplish nothing even if he managed to make it to president. If he had actually be rocking the boat, as a socialist, he’d have been buried long ago like the others.
Which brings me back to the bearded young god with eyes of fire. In the 80s, when I read a few biographies of Che, he was generally described as going down to foment rebellion in Bolivia, but was captured and killed there. The implication was always that, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Che died in some kind of action down in the deep bush and was buried in an unmarked grave. But now we find out that the establishment killed him, too. That Che was run down and killed by a CIA death squad which was sent for the specific purpose of silencing him and closing those eyes. Because the US establishment was terrified that there might be another Cuba.
CIA operative Felix Rodriguez is interviewed on BBC Witness podcast [bbc]:
At home in Miami, Felix Rodriguez shows of souvenirs from one of the proudest moments in his long career fighting communism.
“That’s the last picture of Che, taken with me, before he died – maybe an hour, hour and a half before he was killed.”The slightly faded photograph shows a scowling Che Guevara, his hands tied in front of him, looking straight into the camera. Beside him, a young and stern-looking Felix Rodriguez, in uniform. [Those are US-issue Vietnam-style BDUs]
“To see a man who was so powerful at one point in time, and to see the way that he was at that point in time – he looked like a beggar; a completely different image than what people perceive of him in the world.”
Rodriguez was one of the Cubans who fled to Miami, who became a recruit pool for the CIA in anti-Cuba activities. He’s probably lucky he didn’t wind up dead in the Bay of Pigs. Guevara was less lucky.
The revolutions in Cuba and Che’s attempt to export revolution to Bolivia, were huge threats to the US establishment. There were vast monied interests that were threatened by socialism (which, in my opinion, blurred into de-colonialism).
Felix Rodriguez says that his instructions were clear: the CIA wanted him [Guevara] alive so that he could be interrogated properly. The Bolivian military wanted him dead.
“And then they said ‘Mi Capitan, there is a phone call from the high Bolivian command.’ When I answered the phone, there was a simple code that we had developed and they gave me 500 then 600. The code was 500=Che, 600=Dead and 700=Keep him alive.
[…]
I stood in front of him and said ‘Commander, I am sorry.” And he said, ‘It is better this way; I never should have been captured alive.”
Please spare a hearty “fuck you” when you hear some establishment mouthpiece nattering about whether the US can cope with socialism or a socialist candidate. The US has been coping with socialism for a long time, using what can only be described as a campaign of repression and terror.
This is one of the main reasons I leaned toward Warren rather than Sanders. As much as I think Sanders has the right ideas, I have no confidence that anyone, even the democrats, would support anything his presidency would proposes.
Warren would have a difficult time, but I believe she would have a clear goal, a path to get there, and an understanding that compromise is necessary to take steps along that path. Warren would also understand that the path she charted would not be completed within a four-year time-span, so it would be published for future politicians to use as a guideline. I haven’t seen either the level of detail or clarity of steps in the Sanders campaign as I saw in the Warren campaign.
Sanders may well have similar goals, but I’m not certain he has a path, and I know he would face roadblocks. Not because he wouldn’t compromise, but because no opportunity for compromise would be allowed.
It took a decade long economic depression which hurt even the rich for structural changes in the US economy to be put in place. They lasted for about 30 years before being dismantled, starting with Nixon. During that time we had good economic growth among all classes of people. But in the end, the possibility of that everyone might really become equal, men equal to woman, white equal to black, native equal to immigrant, and that every minority group was fighting to get that equality, was too much. Maybe that is slowly changing with the generations, but there is an active campaign to create divisions in our society, to avoid unifying groups which should be on the same side. The side of equality for all people living in the USA; citizens, immigrants, children, and elderly. Not equality in outcome, but equality in justice, treatment, opportunity, respect, and level of fear. But as the oligarchy has learned, that cannot happen if people are too worried about their own economic security to pay attention to how other people are doing.
It’s important to remember that the “US establishment” is not entirely monolithic. In reality there are probably multiple factions, but for most purposes we can consider two principle groupings: the insane billionaires and the non-insane billionaires. The insane billionaires want to kill everybody and take all their stuff right now, while the non-insane billionaires want to keep the little people around and in reasonable working order, the better to live off their backs long-term. (I’m heavily borrowing from someone else here, but I can’t remember who and I can’t find it.) The difference matters.
So sure, Bernie doesn’t fundamentally threaten the system, but the system does allow for a wider range of policy options than you might think. Also, “fundamentally threatening the system” comes with a whole bunch of very unpleasant side effects that any sane person should be extremely wary of, and does not have any guarante of a positive outcome. If you really think that revolution is the way to go, you need to seriously ask yourself just how many of your neighbour’s skulls you’re personally prepared to smash in with an improvised melee weapon, and how many core social services (like clean drinking water, the availability of basic foodstuffs, and functioning sewerage systems) you’re prepared to give up, for the sake of at best a 50% chance of improving matters. Ask all those Iranian socialist feminists who were involved in the ’79 revolution how well it worked out for them – if you can find any left.
One of my students — a Woman of Color — told me “I’m supporting Biden. I’ve seen too many revolutions, and they never turn out well.”
… America re-invents slave labor in the form of low-wage extorted prison work for capitalists. That is actually one invention from the nazis that the US has adopted; usually the adoption was the other way around.
Eh? The 14th Amendment, and state prison farms, came into force decades before Hitler’s birth.
Pierce R. Butler@#4:
Eh? The 14th Amendment, and state prison farms, came into force decades before Hitler’s birth.
You’re right. Arrgh. I was thinking of the factories next to the death camps. Henry Ford didn’t go quite that far but he probably would have. Andrew Carnegie for damn sure would have.
brucegee1962@#3:
One of my students — a Woman of Color — told me “I’m supporting Biden. I’ve seen too many revolutions, and they never turn out well.”
That’s for sure.
I’ve written a bit before about how on the fence I am about revolutions, for that reason. But also usually because they end up with the revolutionaries in an unmarked grave.
Dunc@#2:
It’s important to remember that the “US establishment” is not entirely monolithic. In reality there are probably multiple factions, but for most purposes we can consider two principle groupings: the insane billionaires and the non-insane billionaires. The insane billionaires want to kill everybody and take all their stuff right now, while the non-insane billionaires want to keep the little people around and in reasonable working order, the better to live off their backs long-term. (I’m heavily borrowing from someone else here, but I can’t remember who and I can’t find it.) The difference matters.
That’s a good description. Yes, there is no establishment with a grand plan, it’s a web of interlocking mutual self-interests and the participants range from dumbass libertarian chucklefucks to outright sociopathic fascists and probably a few dadaists and Maoists thrown in for good measure. They’re not a unified force that acts with an agenda; they’re fellow-travellers who all think that going off the cliff is OK because they plan to jump out of the car right at the last minute.
flex@#1:
Maybe that is slowly changing with the generations, but there is an active campaign to create divisions in our society, to avoid unifying groups which should be on the same side. The side of equality for all people living in the USA; citizens, immigrants, children, and elderly. Not equality in outcome, but equality in justice, treatment, opportunity, respect, and level of fear. But as the oligarchy has learned, that cannot happen if people are too worried about their own economic security to pay attention to how other people are doing.
Some people refer to that sort of impetus as a form of nihilism. I, personally, as a nihilist, do not. But I don’t know what else it’s called – I think of those people as Kali cultists; they are actively opposed to seeing certain other people succeed even a little bit, even if it costs them or means they fail,too. As one of the LOD in the great hacker war once said, “It’s not enough to win, it’s seeing the other guy lose that matters.”
Isaiah Berlin wrote about “positive liberty” and “negative liberty” and, while I don’t like the vague labels, I sometimes think that we’re looking at a form of “positive success” and “negative success” – one form of success is when you, you know, do well and are happy about it and move on – but the other is when you are not happy succeeding and moving on until you are able to move on by walking over the corpses of your defeated opponents. That sort of behavior manifests itself in the sort of zero-sum view some authoritarian submissives appear to have regarding freedom: if you give someone else something it implicitly devalues what they have. They literally think their marriages are damaged by gays being able to marry. Somehow. Normally, I shake my head and think “chucklefucks” but those are who we have running the world right now.
“… and hear the lamentations of their women.”
I dunno; violent rhetoric like “socialist-led executions in Central Park” seems like exactly the sort of thing to promote a stochastic terrorist assassination of Bernie Sanders.
“Hey, you can’t blame us“, they’ll say. “Our nationwide-broadcasted journalists and pundits have freedom of speech! They can say whatever they want! It’s not our fault if some lone-wolf nutcase hears this obvious hyperbole and grabs a gun that he has the right to bear and commits murder!”
Am I being overly-paranoid here?
Deliberate blindness.
I’m a big fan of Dicken’s and of The Christmas Carol in particular. I think that in many adaptations Scrooge gets short shrift. Scrooge’s character, before his aneurysm, is summed up in one scene, in the first stave (edited for clarity):
Scrooge: “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned (prisons and workhouses though taxation) – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
Gentleman collecting for Charity: “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do ti, and decrease the surplus population. Besides – excuse me – I don’t know that.”
Gentleman collecting for Charity: “But you might know it.”
Scrooge: “It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”
The rich are not nihilists, they are not even necessarily greedy, they are deliberately blind. They can go to a third-world country, or a slum in the USA, and their eyes register the condition people live in, but they don’t comprehend. They deliberately don’t comprehend. They know that if they did comprehend how lives are wasted, or how much injustice exists, or how the planet is in trouble, or even how the workers in the factories they own are having trouble getting the necessities of life, they would have to do something. And it’s not just the rich. The complacent middle class (and I’m one of them), spend their lives going from their home to their work, and on their vacations they ignore the injustice their eyes register.
I’ll be honest, I have thought about how to get involved in skilled-trades work in developing countries, or disaster relief work. I can do electrical wiring, plumbing, build concrete forms, drive trucks, engine repair, even climb poles and do linesman’s work. But I choose to collect my paycheck as an engineering manager, try to pay off my mortgage, and spend my spare time improving my house or reading (current topic: Al-Andalus). I recognize in myself the moderate liberal whom Dr. King was railing at in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. I will support in my vote and with financial donations to people who will make change, but I don’t want to shoulder that burden myself. Not that I’ve been inactive on social justice all my life, but I am now.
But we make a mistake when we tell ourselves that people who are rich, or even just well-off, are nihilists, or deliberately cruel, or even want to gloat over the fate of others who are impacted by the selfish policies they fight for. It’s much worse than that. They don’t even care enough to gloat. Like Scrooge, they deliberately prevent themselves from knowing that they have enough, and that they could help others. They could contribute to the well-being of other people, other creatures, and the planet.
Or, at the very least, step aside.
It strikes me that Bernard Sanders is not actually all that far from the mainstream of US politics. Which has never been devoid of a socialist element, even at the height of the Cold War. He’s basically where Franklin Roosevelt was in the 1930s and 40s. To even British eyes (and we’re about the furthest right Western Europeans there are), he’s only arguing for things that pretty much everyone on our political spectrum takes for granted anyway. He’s not a radical in any sense. Even he doesn’t cast himself as one. I don’t know why anyone thinks he is.
Indeed, from an actual radical socialist perspective, he’s just about the only candidate on the US political scene who stands a chance of preserving the capitalist system from its own contradictions for any length of time – as Roosevelt did in the 30s. Everyone else you have over there is committed to shepherding the country ever further into the mires of late-stage capitalism and its eventual destruction. What happens after that is difficult to guess, but it will certainly look a lot less like what exists now than anything a Sanders presidency would create.
@ 12 cartomancer
He’s basically where Franklin Roosevelt was in the 1930s and 40s.
You beat me to it. He is, as he says, a social democrat, pretty much a Roosevelt New Dealer in US terms, and, perhaps the US’s last chance to prop up late stage neoliberal capitalism in the US for a little while longer. He would not be considered particularly radical in Canada
Teddy Roosevelt helped save capitalism before WWI, FDR did the same before WWll and Bernie might have a chance at another rescue.
flex @#11
Nowadays my life is reasonably good. My income is below average for the city I live in, but you don’t need much money to have a comfortable life when you are childfree and don’t have to pay rent, mortgage, or student loans. That being said, I lived in poverty as a child.
The thing that pisses off many poor people is how the wealthy imagine that poor people must be stupid or at least extremely uneducated. “If you weren’t stupid, you wouldn’t be poor,” they think. “If you could be trusted to make wise financial decisions, you wouldn’t be poor,” they say. Charities often give poor people food, clothes, or housing, but they don’t give them money. The basic idea being that poor people make poor financial decisions and would only waste the money that’s given to them. There are plenty of wealthier people who believe that they have a duty to help poor people, because it is wrong to watch other people suffer. Simultaneously, they also patronize poor people and look down on them.
When I was a child, my mother didn’t need a soup kitchen. She was working at two jobs and didn’t have time to commute to a soup kitchen that was located in the opposite part of the city. On top of that, she had a stove and she knew damn well how to cook healthy meals on her own. Her problem was that she didn’t have money to buy food, the ingredients that are necessary for cooking.
You said that you know how to do wiring, plumbing, and build concrete forms. Guess what, many poor people also know how to build homes. They don’t need the overly educated white person from a rich country to come to their town and personally pour concrete for them. Instead, their problem is that they don’t have any money to buy concrete, tools, and building materials.
When it comes to helping poor people, the primary method should be to just give them money. In general, they aren’t stupid and lazy, they can work on their own, they just need money to be able to buy various materials.
Of course, I understand that eradicating poverty is complicated. Even distributing money without running into corruption and theft is hard.
And sometimes various problems really can be solved more efficiently in ways other than distributing cash to poor people. For example, if you buy potatoes in metric tons, then you get a much better price than if you give money to the poor person who then goes grocery shopping and buys a few kilograms. Alternatively, providing healthcare is another complicated problem.
Anyway, my main point was that those who want to help eradicate poverty and suffering should stop looking down on the very people they are trying to help. Poor people are neither stupid nor incapable of improving their own lives. Instead, they just lack the resources (read: money) to do it.
Therefore, if you have some spare money, simply giving it to poor people who have no money is a pretty good way how to help solve their problems.
Yeah, there is quite a lot of evidence that simply giving poor people money (“direct financial transfers” in the jargon) is by far the best way to help them. As for corruption and theft, yes, these problems are inevitable, but the sort of measures that are typically employed to limit them often aren’t actually cost-effective.
The revolution is guaranteed. A system which does not function *will* collapse; people *will not* tolerate it forever. (We can already see this in the polling broken down by age. Every age bracket under 45 is majority-ready for massive change because they perceive the current “system” as nonfunctional. Sanders beats Biden, both beat Trump. Currently only the aged population groups are trying to cling to the current dysfunctional “system” — maybe after they’re killed by coronavirus things will change.)
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Electing someone like Warren or Sanders is an attempt to *avoid* a violent revolution. Someone like Joe Biden is sleepwalking into the revolution.
The US establishment has already collapsed; people just haven’t noticed yet.
The question is very much what will come next. Revolutions are highly unpredictable in terms of their aftermaths. None of the French Revolutionaries predicted Napoleon.
That’s why you have to support reformers like Warren or Sanders if you want an even slightly predictable outcome.
(In other words: What cartomancer said.)
I’m probably pretty late responding to this, but I needed to think of something to say.
flex @11 captures me well. I was in high school in the early ’60s, well after Brown v. Board but still before Loving v. Virginia, when racism was still the norm. I remember some of us painting some walls in a black school and feeling very proud
of ourselves.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I made the conscious decision that things like racism and sexism were both stupid and immoral, and I didn’t want to be either of those. After about forty years of practice, with any luck, I’m getting better at it.
What does it matter if he smelled? Typical American labeling BS imo. Most soldiers smell in fighting/training so sick of this BS. I smell after I work out.
margecullen@#18:
What does it matter if he smelled? Typical American labeling BS imo. Most soldiers smell in fighting/training so sick of this BS. I smell after I work out.
That’s true. From the fact that it was considered salient in a biography, I assumed it meant that his personal hygiene was notably bad, even for a guerilla. Usually when a history of a person is written, facts like that are mentioned if they were noted on by others who were involved with the person or who remarked on it. In other words, it may have mattered to the people who were in cars and tents with him.
I don’t care. But it sounds like it was memorable for others.